A Calibre plugin for Greek book metadata

A few days ago, I sort of promised to deliver a plugin for Calibre for  greek book metadata. I had to dive into Python to accomplish this task but, as I said in the previous post, I had no Python knowledge.

Thank God, all programming languages have many things is common. So, with the assistance of this brilliant short tutorial by Stavros Korokithakis I managed to get a grasp of the basics quickly.

Then I found a couple of similar plugins, studied them a bit, and,  voila, the offspring of this endeavor: the Biblionet calibre plugin.
(Those not interested in code should  download the plugin from here because the github zip adds an extra folder to the plugin and generates an error when trying to add it).

Installation
To install the plugin, open Calibre, go to Preferences>Change Calibre behavior, scroll down and locate in the Advanced section the Plugins icon. Click it and the following window will appear:

Choose “Load plugin from file”, answer ‘yes’ to the warning that will pop up, and you are done.

Use
The best option for mass entering and mass updating printed books in calibre IMHO is this:

Use a mobile phone barcode scanner app to read the isbn barcodes, or write them down, one per line, in a text file.

Then copy paste them in the relevant calibre dialog box (see picture) and fire the process.

The Future
This plugin is not a complete one. Unlike most of  the other metadata plugins,  it only makes use of the book ISBN (10 or 13 digit) to query the biblionet database.
Normally such a plugin can also make use of the  title and author info. But for adding printed books entried  in calibre (that was my initial motive, remember?)  that would be rather tedious, as one would have to manually type every single one of them.
This (:the isbn only feature) is going to change in the next version and the plugin will be able to query metadata based on title or author too.

There is another difference: the plugin makes use of the bookmeta script that acts like a proxy between the plugin and the biblionet database, so the script had to be hosted somewhere. I hosted it at phpfog.com.
If you have some techinal skills, you can host the script wherever you like. Then just  edit the plugin file __init__.py, locate the following line,

    BASE_URL = 'http://bookmeta.phpfogapp.com/index.php?isbn='

and change the ‘http://bookmeta.phpfogapp.com/‘ to the address of your server.
If not, remain assured that I will host this solution to phpfog for your convenience.

In the next version of the plugin, this need will be eliminated. The plugin will not require this kind of intermediary. But the bookmeta script will stay, as there might be other programs/services that could potentially use it.

If you want to fork the plugin and make your own, head to github and serve yourselves.

Please give some feedback if you decide to use the plugin. It both motivates and helps

About Nikos Anagnostou

Entrepreneur, web developer, blogger